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You simply don't win an argument with a group of trolls by feeding them.

But, in all who fairness, which side is 'not' a troll in this story??? There is no way Gene is not milking this for all the publicity he can get. The guy licenses KISS coffee houses and coffins for crying out loud!!

After all, what is his loss? Would his website really have generated more revenue during the DDoS'ing than what this much publicity would have cost?

I'm just waiting for him to post a Google image-searched picture of a bloodied kid with a caption saying "We got one" like that white supremacist web radio host did a few years back.

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

THESuperShawn (764971) writes "The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world's biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential. Universal's roster of artists includes stars like U2, Akon and Amy Winehouse.

Representatives for Universal and Apple declined to comment. The move, which comes after a standoff in negotiations, is likely to be regarded in the music industry as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels. With the shift, Universal appears to be aiming to regain a bit of leverage — although at the risk of provoking a showdown with Mr. Jobs.

This move could be as much of a blow to Universal as to Apple- 5 percent of Universal's worldwide revenue in the first quarter, or more than $200 million, came from iTunes sales."Link to Original Source

THESuperShawn (764971) writes "(Paraphrased from http://www.firemeg.com/2007/05/july-9th-genocide-b egins-how-ebay-inc.html)"A recent Auctionbytes article (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m05/i21/s 01) about a new update to the eBay User Agreement seems to make eBay look a lot more like Big Brother, if not a full blown communist regime where your thoughts belong to the "community" and where those with bad thoughts may be disappeared. The changes in question went into effect immediately for new members and will be enforced site-wide starting on July 9th, 2007. Most notable of these changes is that eBay seems to have given itself autonomy to strike down anyone they see fit, and use any and all copyrighted material that members post on the site, without permission or royalties.

In the user agreement additions there is a section entitled "Abusing eBay." The section begins like something out of Orwell's 1984, "eBay and the Community work together to keep the Sites working properly and the Community safe. Please report problems, offensive content, and policy violations to us." Seems to be a call to arms for the collective community gestapo to quash anything from listing violations to dissent among users, and of course for the betterment of the community with no financial incentives for users to do the work that many feel should be done by Trust & Safety. The second paragraph goes on to describe the VERO program designed to keep members from using intellectual property that has been copyrighted previously by third parties.

The "Abusing eBay" section then turns an even more diabolical shade of Big Brother in the last paragraph which reads: Without limiting other remedies, we may limit, suspend, or terminate our service and user accounts, prohibit access to our website, delay or remove hosted content, and take technical and legal steps to keep users off the Sites if we think that they are creating problems, possible legal liabilities, or acting inconsistently with the letter or spirit of our policies. We also reserve the right to cancel unconfirmed accounts or accounts that have been inactive for a long time."

Has eBay finally jumped the shark? Is their a better auction service around the corner ready to embrace scorned eBay users? Or have the scammers won (http://www.ebaymotorssucks.com/ebayhacks/?N=A) and eBay will continue to remove negative posts/NARU users that complain (http://www.ebaymotorssucks.com/boardsnippets.htm) , and allow scammers to sell "their wife exposed" (http://www.ebaymotorssucks.com/)?"

THESuperShawn (764971) writes "While Apple has previously stated that Steve Jobs had no knowledge of any stock wrongdoing, it looks like the US Government wants to take a look anyway.

"Federal authorities are investigating a backdated stock-option grant awarded to Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs that carried a false October 2001 date, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday."

"Apple said last month that a stock options grant for Jobs was improperly recorded as being approved at a special board meeting on October 19, 2001. "Such a special board meeting did not occur," Apple said in a filing on December 29.

The false dating increased the value of the grant of 7.5 million options to Jobs, and Apple said it had to take a $20 million charge as a result. "